The Arabic sh-r-k
-- ش ر ك-- connotes to share, to participate in,
to become partner (Wehr, 1960, p. 468). A “musharaka” is thus a partnership, a cooperation, a collaboration, a complicity (ibid., p. 469).
Applied to God this concept is blasphemous: a “mushrik” is a polytheist (and Christianity’s core fault for many Muslims is its tendency to partner Jesus with God). “ishtirakiya,” OTOH, is socialism …

March 23, 2009

How do you say "jihad" in Hebrew?

Over the course of
the last month, since attending a teach-in about the war on Gaza at the
University of Pennsylvania, I have followed with growing horror news accounts of the circumstances
under which some members of the Israeli military killed Palestinian civilians.
The question that
has haunted me is this: How do you raise children in an ethical and moral
tradition inspired by belief in a compassionate God, and then send them out at
the age of 18 to kill their neighbors on God's behalf? We know that the
Christian Crusaders in the Middle Ages, like young Americans North and South during
our own Civil War, marched into battle convinced that God was on their side and
that religion compelled them to act as they did. We have also heard a great
deal in the last decade about the ways the term "jihad," based on the
Islamic concept of a spiritual struggle to be close to God and a physical
struggle to defend one's religious community from attack, has been turned by
radical Muslim preachers into an admonition to kill noncombatants. We now learn
that the chief Rabbi of the IDF -- as well as the religious leaders of a number
of theological schools supplying soldiers to the Israeli forces -- admonished
the troops in Gaza to think of the Palestinians residing there as deserving the
same treatment accorded the biblical inhabitants of the lands promised by God
to the children of Moses: the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Amalekites. In
the latter case, we learn from numerous references in the Old Testament, King
David's forces were told not merely to defeat Amalek but to exterminate his
people. According to recent news reports in The Jerusalem Post, Haaretz,
and The
New York Times, some Israeli forces were not only admonished to consider
the example of the fate
of Amalek as they dealt with the citizens of Gaza, but also to bear
specifically in mind their duty not to show mercy:

Those who oppose the religious right have been
especially concerned about the influence of the military’s chief rabbi, Brig.
Gen. Avichai Rontzki, who is himself a West Bank settler and who was very
active during the war, spending most of it in the company of the troops in the
field.

He took a quotation from a classical Hebrew text
and turned it into a slogan during the war: “He who is merciful to the cruel
will end up being cruel to the merciful.”
A controversy then arose when a booklet handed out
to soldiers was found to contain a rabbinical edict against showing the enemy
mercy. The Defense Ministry reprimanded the rabbi.
At the time, in January, Avshalom Vilan, then a
leftist member of Parliament, accused the rabbi of having “turned the Israeli
military’s activity from fighting out of necessity into a holy war.” (Retrieved
from The New York Times, March 22, 2009)

This Quaker's plea
to the "people of the book," Jews, Christians, and Muslims is that we
rise up as one in our churches and mosques and synagogues and say to these
false preachers "Not in the name of the God we worship. Not in the name of
the Merciful One extolled for all these centuries in our sacred books. Not in
the name of our ancestors who have died in wars of religious oppression. Not by
our faith that our children can live in a world free of pious murder."

Comments

I return to this posting from time to time, usually after I have sent the URL to a friend. Today I found my way out through the Wikipedia on Amalek to an excellent Torah source at bible.ort.org
Deuteronomy 25:19
Therefore, when God gives you peace from all the enemies around you in the land that God your Lord is giving you to occupy as a heritage, you must obliterate the memory of Amalek from under the heavens. You must not forget.